An important aspect of bacteriological culturing and sub-culturing techniques is to keep contamination to minimum while transferring the bacterial colonies to ensure accurate results. For this, a number of culturing apparatus and culturing equipment's are in use till date to prevent and/or avoid contamination of the cultures and also to protect the users from exposure to harmful pathogens.
The aseptic procedure in use for culturing, sub-culturing and purifying bacteria include ways to transfer bacterial or other biological material from one culture media to another by using transfer tools while also maintaining highly aseptic conditions.
Tools most commonly and routinely used in microbiological laboratories include inoculating loops and needles (to transfer bacteria), bunsen burners and incinerators. Working under aseptic conditions includes sterilizing the inoculating loop or needle. This is a multi-step process and includes heating the inoculating loop in a flame until it becomes red hot, cooling the inoculating loop in alcohol before touching the culture, picking up the organism to be transferred, transferring the culture to a new container and heating the inoculating loop again to destroy any remaining organism. One of the biggest disadvantages of working under the procedure is sterilization of the entire process which has to be repeated with every single transfer of biological material. This makes the whole process cumbersome, unsuitable and unsafe as many a times needle is not sufficiently sterilized or the needle might get over heated which can kill the biological material. Also, the whole process can be hazardous for inexpert user or can be accidental if the alcohol and bunsen burner are not in a sufficiently safe distance.
Laboratories also use plastic disposable loops instead of metal loops/needles to transfer the biological material. These are pre-sterilized however still pose certain disadvantages as to the quantity and ease with which the loops can be used. For example, the box of the disposable loops has to be both handy and in a safe environment so that user can take out one loop at a time and have to be cautious in resealing the box/bag immediately to prevent contamination and thus is not convenient for processing large number of sample.
Thus, there is still a long-felt need for safe, easy to handle and time saving apparatus to transfer biological material and further to prevent its users from exposure to hazardous exposure to biological material.